Bret Easton Ellis' Worst Tweets of 2012

It’s year’s end, which means we’re doing a lot of roundups of our cultural touchstones from 2012. But not all roundups have to be of the things we liked, right? Enter American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis, whose Twitter feed, as much as we hate to admit it, definitely ranked on our cultural radar this year. To be honest, a lot of what he says is truly hilarious, he recommends good books (he’s been on about SkippyDies recently, which we also loved), and we actually find his insistence that Magic Mike was the best movie of 2012 kind of refreshing. But at this point, he’s much more famous for the pretty awful things he says than he is for the clever ones. And he can be an enormous jerk. Remember when he said bullying victims should “man up“? Or how about the time he compared watching Glee to stepping into a puddle of HIV? Or the time he celebrated J.D. Salinger’s death? Well, he’s only stepped up his game this year. After the jump, we present BEE’s most offensive, most left-field, and flat-out worst tweets of 2012. Feel free to argue with us in the comments.

September 6, 2012. We’re going to count Ellis’s early-September rant of David Foster Wallace-hating as one tweet here, mostly because we can’t pick the worst one. Yes, everyone is allowed to have their own opinion, and we may be sensitive here because we count ourselves among those “Literary Doucebag-Fools” [sic], but we find it incredibly classless to rail against a relatively recently-dead writer in this way.

Fun fact: at the New Yorker Festival’s panel “Re-Reading David Foster Wallace” in October, D.T. Max brought up Ellis’s tweets, and the fact that he had elsewhere referred to Wallace as being “too smart for fiction” to the panelists. Mary Karr shrugged, saying that it sounded to her like the complaint of someone not as smart as David. When the crowd cheered, she reminded us that we were all stupider than him too.